Poetry, or the poetic, is first and foremost, a way of thinking. It's a mode of thought vital to a lively brain. One can't afford to be elitist about it, but rather hope that humanity shares in it. The words themselves, the play of sounds, the poetic devices of rhythm and rhyme and meter, all that will follow, falling into place naturally. It's a good way of sorting things out in the mind, and the ear and the brain's vocabulary awakens at its employ.

Poetic thinking is as serious, viable and effective as logic. (We wouldn't be here without it.) As if all else were inadequate, Lincoln employs it in crucial moments, his moments of moral thinking, of finding a solid base for actions to follow upon. (Even as his remarkable rise from backwoods to high office suggests a wide-open world of great possibility for someone who strives with some ambition--maybe more so than our hyper-competitive times allow--it is interesting that once he'd arrived his decisions over what would be just and right were based on poetic understanding, for example, the right tack on 'all men are created equal,' through the definition of a nation at Gettysburg, to the restraint of the Second Inaugural.)

Poetry is a tool in the human tool box, vital and often underestimated. Our minds are capable of and even adept at translating poetic thoughts and putting them into, as the Buddhists say, proper action, proper speech, proper thinking.

A quiet little woman in Amherst was employing it, creating a laboratory of thought in her reclusive chamber. Melville employs it in the blank verse of prose in a great book on industry and nature and religion, Moby Dick. Earlier, Keats was bringing the gift of poetry forward, high thoughts newly accessible, so that all could read what was 'writ on water.' Each a living emblem of democracy.

The poet's ambition is to figure something out. No more, no less. And then to share in what all are capable of, as an example, as a lead, as a follower all in one.